Congress passed a bill last year adding lighters to the list of items prohibited in the cabin. The ban started mid April 2005. Lighters haven't been permitted in checked bags for at least 30 years because they might start fires in cargo holds. The reason for the ban was the failed shoe bomber, Richard Reid, who tried unsuccessfully to light explosives hidden in his shoes on a trans-Atlantic flight in 2001. He used matches.
Category Archives: archive
The Spice Islands by Jon Hornbuckle
The killing is over on Ambon, the hub of the Moluccas, or Spice
Islands, in Indonesia. There is an invisible line drawn between the
Christian and Muslim sectors in the City – it is still dangerous to
stop on the wrong side. The burnt out churches, houses and even
university buildings are reminders of the carnage that occurred a
short while ago, when Ambon was likened to Beirut at its worst.
“So it was a religious war?” I enquire. “Not really,
more the result of political manoeuvrings. Now we have peace and
democracy, but no jobs, clean streets or reliable infrastructure,
the opposite of neighbouring Singapore.” Almost incredibly,
fair and trouble-free elections had just been completed, much to
the surprise of the incumbent president, who refused to accept
defeat. “I would rather be in the hands of the Chinese army
than the Indonesian”, a French photo-journalist told us later,
after describing how he had to injure himself to persuade the
Chinese soldiers to release him. “You won't be killed or
“disappear” in their custody.”
With two friends I drove across the spine of Ambon to Hila, an old
village overlooking the much larger island of Ceram, passing
countless cloves and nutmegs drying in the sun on the roadside. It
was hard to believe that centuries ago such spices were valued more
highly than gold, with the result that the islands were a
battle-ground for the colonial powers, ending when we swapped our
land there for New York, after smuggling out seedlings to establish
plantations in India! We hiked up a steep trail, through spice
plantations, to a ridge with a spectacular view over the partially
forested hillsides. Here we strove to observe two species of
parrots endemic to these islands, which we could hear but not see.
We returned early the following morning and were rewarded by the
sight of the electric Moluccan Red Lory and the “poorly
known”, to quote the bird book, but well-named Drab
Honeyeater. On the drive back to the airport, we stopped to chat
and photo the friendly locals, many of whom were Muslims.
The main reason for going to Ambon was to take a flight to the
rarely visited Tanimbar Islands, some two hours east of Ambon. The
only flights were with Merpati, whose slogan “Get the
feeling” aptly described schedules in these parts as feelings
were all you could rely on, with nobody outside their office in
Ambon knowing when such flights would occur. Fortunately, we were
able to fly to Saumlaki on Yamdena, the main island of the
Tanimbars, on the desired day, a most uncomfortable experience in
an ancient 22-seater. We then discovered that we could not fly to
the relatively close Kai Islands as we wanted, flights having been
suspended, and the flight we had “booked” back to Ambon
did not run that day. As the previous day was full, we got a
booking for the day after, but no tickets as the agent had gone to
the airport to investigate why the plane had returned. The answer
was that the pilot had felt ill and so decided to come back to
Saumlaki, apparently not trusting his co-pilot to take-over.
The Tanimbars are at almost the south-eastern extremity of the 5000
km long Indonesian Archipelago, only 150 km from the coast of
Australia. Unlike most of the country, the population is
predominantly Christian. At the Harapan Indah, the only hotel in
town, we arranged to stay at the owners' farm 21 km along the
island's only road, so that we had ready access to the native
forest. By the time we reached the farm, after supplies had been
purchased, including a crate of beer, it was raining – the first
time for 4 months so it was said. We had come here to try to see
the 20 or more special birds endemic to these parts, a surprisingly
high number for such a relatively small area. When the rain
stopped, we set forth, amongst much bird activity, but were
disappointed to find the extensive forest reported to be present by
the last person we knew to have visited, some 10 years ago, had
gone and only patches of logged forest remained. 
However, over the
next 4 days we saw all the specialities, including 2 parrots, 2
thrushes and 5 flycatchers, apart from the Tanimbar Scrubfowl,
sadly scarce or elusive due to hunting, and the Pied Bronze Cuckoo.
Strangely, I had recorded the song of the cuckoo on the first
afternoon, but never heard it again. According to the book, it
parasitizes the endemic Rufous sided Gerygone, but the only bird to
react to the playback of its song, on several occasions, was the
Wallacean Whistler – indicating that this species is the main host
for the cuckoo's eggs.
On the last afternoon, we visited the old village of Turgham. We
started at the mayor's house, where a meeting of the village
elders was in progress. After mutual greetings, we signed the
visitors book, noting that all previous visitors of the last 2-3
years looked to be either Indonesians or Australians, the latter
associated with the annual Darwin to Saumlaki boat race apparently.
At a wood-carver's house we bought a number of carvings from
the selection on offer by several local artists – good quality and
value. We were invited to drink a glass of Soli, local spirit
distilled from palm wine- highly alcoholic and surprisingly smooth.
Returning to the Harapan Indah in Saumlaki, we enjoyed the
air-conditioning, until ended by a power cut, and were amused to
observe the staff ironing banknotes flat, perhaps to facilitate
storage as even the smallest item can require a large number of
notes, the exchange rate being 16, 000 Rupiah to the pound. The
trappings of civilisation are a bit thin on the ground here: no
mobile phone cover, internet access or shopping malls. Predictably,
our flight was delayed by late arrival of the plane but this gave
us chance to study the profusion of Oriental Plovers and Little
Curlews on the runway – two species rarely encountered away from
their wintering grounds in northern Australia. It was a shame we
could not fly to Kai but we all agreed this last minute extension
to our eastern Indonesia trip had been a highly rewarding and
pleasant experience.
World Photo Day 1st June 2005
Here is a marvellous opportunity to photograph our lives and submit to World Photo Day.
The World PhotoDay 2005 project is an exploration into the everyday lives of people on a global scale. The diversity of this planet we inhabit is grand beyond belief. While you are having breakfast reading the paper, what do you think the rest of the world is doing? You will find out what happens on just one single day in the lives of people worldwide. No one is excluded from participating – you can be a professional, an amateur, someone who has a 35mm disposable, or whatever. The intent here is to show us, humankind, as we are. If you are using the latest digital SLR, or a disposable camera, great! Submissions will not be accepted until June 1, 2005 @ 00:01 hours GMT.
All photos must be taken on this single day – 1st June 2005, please! Try to depict life on just one day in the world as seen through your eyes, the photographer. Pre-registration is required to participate. Submissions are limited to 1 (one) photo per person. This is due only to the organiser's limitations in handling multiple photos per individual.
Take a look at: http://www.worldphotoday.org
Answer to Flag Quiz
How did you do in our Flag Quiz
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Plague of Locusts
Experts estimate that 100 million locusts swarmed over the Canary Islands in November. The locusts, nicknamed 'sky prawns' have invaded Fuerteventura and Lanzarote, the worst incidence in over 50 years. The desert locusts flew to the Canaries across the 60 miles of ocean from North Africa, where an infestation this summer wreaked havoc on crops. The insects, around 2.5 in long and two grams in weight, can travel twice that far in 24 hours. A 40 million swarm can eat 40,000 tons of vegetation a day.
Copenhagen by Kevin Brackley
A few days holiday to use and the hunt was on for a cheap flight to a not too far distant city that I had yet to explore. The Internet came up with a £50 flight to Copenhagen, so I hit the buttons on the PC and the next morning that nice little ticket came through the letterbox.
Despite being a cheapie, the Maersk flight departed Gatwick on time and actually landed early. After collecting my bag, it was quite a walk from the gate to the baggage area. I bought a train ticket to Copenhagen Central Station, 25 Kroner, yep the Danes still use proper money, not silly Euro Roubles! The efficient train takes around 15 minutes to the city.
Next to find my hotel, the first thing to say about accommodation in Copenhagen is it ain’t cheap. My hotel The Cabinn was located a 10 minute walk south of the station and cost around £50 night including a good quality buffet breakfast. The rooms were small, but excellently designed, though the beds are a bit narrow, I did role out one night!
Well off to explore, first stop obviously the Tourist office. They are extremely helpful, lots of information and maps. The walking tours which leave from the Tourist Information at 10 am each day in the summer are excellent. They cost 75 Kroner and take around 2 and a half hours. They are in English explaining the city via its most famous son Hans Christian Anderson. One tip is that you are better off doing the tour on a week day as you can get into courtyards and see parts of buildings not open at the weekend. You also learn gems such as why the knee of the statue of Hans Christian Anderson is so shiny, its because tour buses full of oriental visitors pull up, and they sit on his knee to have their photo taken!
Nyhaven is what you see in all the postcards, a lovely area full of sailing boats and little waterside cafes.
Another tour worth doing is the 50 minute boat trip that leaves from Nyhaven (50 Kroner), you get a close up view of the new Opera house and you get to see the Little Mermaid statue from a different angle, you also get a riverside view of the new “Black Diamond”, this love it or hate it building is the National Library. The boat then heads into the canals of the Christianhavns area. Christiania as the area is known is home to an alternative community, which did have a reputation for drugs, but has cleaned up its act to some degree, though you can still walk down Pusher Street.
For a great view over the city it is hard to beat the climb up the tower of the Trinity Church (20 Kroner), some great views, but the protective fencing at the top does get in the way of photos.
If you want to explore further afield as I did you cant beat making the train trip to Helsingor up the coast to see Elsinor castle, famous in Shakespear’s Hamlet, it is expensive to enter, but the views around it are great. It was during a wander here that the lovely sunshine disappeared and a deluge of rain began, so I headed into Helsingor city and visited the town's museum, which is quite interesting, though there is little in English.
Another trip I made was west to Roskilde, this town is home to a spectacular cathedral, but of far more interest to me was the Viking Ship Museum (75 Kroner), there are Viking ships, well bits of them in the museum and out on the water are new ones built in the old way. You can walk around and see the ships being crafted, there are areas where children and the young at heart can try their hand at crafts from the Viking era.
Back in Copenhagen if you want to chill out after all that sightseeing The Rose Garden in Copenhagen’s second biggest park, Valby Parken is the place. There are quite a few themed gardens to wander round, number 3 has a maze and another has a Japanese theme.
Copenhagen is perfect for a long weekend and if any of you Globies are into Geocaching, there are around 20 to do in the cities environs.
The Beetle had told me Copenhagen was a bit boring when she had visited!
This is a picture of me in the Rose garden, Valby Park Copenhagen. Beetle: where are the roses, Kev?
Our Friends Ryanair
Not sure what to buy your loved ones next Christmas? Why not buy a Ryanair cartoon? This one, see: shows a picture of a man booking a budget flight. The booking agent is grinning frantically and says: the flight is only 99p but it will cost another £120 if you want to do it inside the plane. Yes, quite.
An interesting article in http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=68464 about a man in the US calling a help line to make a complaint to Ryanair’s head office in Dublin. Before calling he noticed that the charges were quite high – 1.75 euro from the Republic of Ireland or £1 from the UK to call. The message clearly stated that the number was for an Irish office. He called several times and each time spoke with someone with an Italian accent and at one point was told that he was calling Italy though other people he spoke to denied this. So he decided to ask what was the weather like in Dublin and not a single person could answer him, so he deduced that he was actually calling Italy. Eventually he managed to speak to a supervisor who also has an Italian accent and they admit that the office where all the calls were going was in Milan in Italy. The supervisor could not explain why the staff were pretending to be in Dublin while actually being in Italy. She would neither confirm nor deny that they had been instructed to lie when asked where they were. Anyone know why?
Oh dear, it seems that Ryanair is coming under scrutiny for poor working conditions. A new website has been set up in September 2004: http://www.ryan-be-fair.org/latestnews.htm to communicate with passengers and employees of Ryanair. From this, the website says, two key issues have arisen:
- Lack of respect and how staff are generally treated
- Salaries and working conditions being as bad as they are.
The International Union Federation said that the website has attracted over half a million hits and revealed what it described as a 'shocking catalogue of misery, low pay and oppression' among the airline's workers. Ryanair employees have used http://www.ryan-be-fair.org to talk about the climate of fear that surrounds them, of 12 hour days without breaks, and of how they even have to pay for the water they need to drink on flights. If you have any information you would like to share about Ryanair, contact the website – everything is strictly confidential, and the website assures that they will not pass your details on to anybody.
[Beetle: These links seem to be down at present, but you can read them via google’s cache here and here]
Another interesting article in the International Herald Tribune by a journalist who underwent the Ryanair experience.
Globetrotter Steve spotted this:
The new partnership between Ryanair and Terravision, the new low cost coach company, now ensures that Ryanair passengers will be able to travel between Rome Ciampino airport and Rome centre, Milan Bergamo airport and Milan centre, Pisa G. Galilei airport and Florence centre quickly and comfortably, but above all at a really low cost!
Look for the Terravision icon on http://www.ryanair.com to book and purchase tickets and avoid queues or alternatively go to one of the many Terravision booths located in 15 European airports. Watch out for new openings in other European city destinations on
Yahoo! And AOL Travel Searches
Travel industry researchers estimate that demand for independently booked travel is set to rise by 80% in the next five years. Both Yahoo! and AOL recently announced that they were improving their travel offerings and setting up as online travel agents. Both companies are developing specialised travel search engines (due to go live in early 2005) that will allow users to compare prices from a range of different travel agents, airlines, hotel groups, resorts and hire car companies. The difference between these offerings and sites such as Lastminute.com or Travelocity is that the Yahoo and AOL travel site will include fares offered by budget airlines. At the moment, other companies do not include listings of many of the budget airlines as most refuse to pay a commission to list their services.
Palma, Northern Mozambique by Tim Crouch
As part of Trade Aid’s work in Tanzania, we aim to promote a sustainable tourism industry in Mikindani area. The following is the impressions of a trip to investigate the tourism and tourism opportunities in Palma, Northern Mozambique.
Palma is a small, fishing town set inside a large bay along the northern coast of Mozambique. It is home to some 10,000 people, most of whom are supported by industries linked to the sea. Like Mikindani, the place is quiet and peaceful and its people and culture are dominated by the influence of the Indian Ocean that surrounds it. In this way, what we expected was something more akin to Mikindani but the reality was quite different.
We arrived in Palma via two pick-up trucks and a boat across the Ruvuma to be greeted by the dusty, sandy sight all so familiar to us after our five months near Mtwara. However, what struck us was the complete absence of the historic buildings and NGO vehicles that dominate the landscape of Mikindani and Mtwara. The vehicle on which we arrived was virtually the only thing to pass through Palma during our stay while the old colonial buildings that dominate the visage of Mikindani were nowhere to be seen. Perhaps this was why Palma almost had a more earthy sense of untampered-with Swahili Coast. The charm of Mikindani lies in the huge mixture of different colonial, native and trade influences that have shaped its past and continues to shape its future. With Palma, it’s great appeal lies in the idea that it never was a settlement of great importance and so you feel, when walking around that this is the natural development of this part of the world.
There was no electricity or running water in the guest house, no Boma to retire to for a cold beer and certainly no hint of mobile phone signal and internet access but Palma itself was all the better for this. These things, along with the presence of brand names such as coca-cola and Pepsi are right for the formerly upwardly mobile Mikindani, a place now beginning to see a revival thanks to enterprises such as the Boma, the brand new ECO2 dive school and the newly revamped Ten Degrees South lodge. However, in a place such as Palma, where people are living on less than a dollar a day and where there has never been a glorious past to compare to that of Mikindani, these things would simply be out of place. We saw no other tourists during our time in Palma, which only served to enhance the feeling of being part of a totally different society. When following a regular tourist route, however sensitive a tour company or hotel may be, you never get to feel as cut off as this.
As part of our
time there we went to see a local group of women rehearsing
traditional Mozambique song (see picture, left). We were
merely walking by when we were invited to sit in on the group
during practice. Listening to the women and drums as the sun
set and the tide came in really will be a lasting memory of
my time spent in East Africa. Later that day we caught a dhow
(traditional African/Arabic sail boat) from Palma all the way
back to Mikindani. This again will stay with me for the rest
of my life as one of the most authentic experiences of the
lives people lead in this part of the world. These sorts of
experiences, however overused the cliché may be,
really are priceless. Money cannot buy memories and certainly
looking at the people of Palma or Mikindani, plays no part in
happiness or generosity. This sort of journey, away from the
beaten track and reach of the guidebooks is highly
recommended and, although not to everyone’s taste, will
provide lasting memories to anyone willing to embark on
them.
The Tsunami
Everyone at the Globetrotters Club would like to pass their condolences and sympathies to all those affected by the tsunami on Boxing Day.
If you are thinking of going to Thailand, here is some up to date news on various resorts. The people in Thailand still need the support of the visiting tourists and are hoping that everyone will not stop coming to their country in their time of need.
Koh Samui, Koh Tao, Koh Samed, Pattaya and all other resorts in the Gulf of Thailand have been unaffected, and tourists are being routed there instead of visiting the West coast.
Koh Ngai has escaped unscathed.
Karon and Kata beaches are not badly affected. Along Karon beach you can hardly see any sign of damage, and the beach is full of people.
Patong beach will probably only take a couple of weeks to get back to normal.
If you are a diver, there are live aboard boats out in the Similan Islands area.
Ao Nang and Krabi only slightly affected.
Khao Lak and Koh Phi Phi totally levelled – thousands dead.
Koh Lanta damaged but not as badly as Phuket, Khao Lak and Koh Phi Phi.